How the Internet is Teaching Men to Hate Women
Are We Writing a Whole New Ugly Chapter in the History of Patriarchy?
“Sexual anguish.” Have you felt it? I have. I’m going to guess that every human being who’s ever lived has. So I was shocked — but not surprised — to see the NYT justifying the mass murder in Atlanta with that idea and phrase. You know how it goes by now: a man kills women, and excuse after excuse is trotted out to justify the violence. He was a good guy! He was just confused, upset, suffering, hurt. He was in “sexual anguish.”
Hey. I spent my teenage years in sexual anguish, and I bet you did, too. How many mass murders did you commit? That’s what I thought.
What’s happening here is something different. It feels like patriarchy has entered a whole new chapter. Men are being taught to hate women — yes, hate — in a new way. Let’s call it “hyper patriarchy.” The internet makes everything faster, harder, dumber, and meaner. And that’s what it’s doing to patriarchy, too.
Let me explain, if it’s not already obvious, as it probably is to many of you. How does the average guy grow up?
As a boy, he enters a society where he’s taught, over and over again, in no uncertain terms, that he is entitled to everything. Money, power, status, and sex. In other words, he is entitled to women’s bodies. We’re not speaking of things like basic human rights, which belong to all — men are taught from the day they’re born, more or less, that everything else in society is to be their property. They have dominion over the rest, from land to money to womens’ bodies, which they are to acquire, in an endless contest of masculinity, where the man who has the most of all these things “wins,” is the “alpha male,” and the rest are to be subordinate to him.
And to win this game of status over one’s fellow men, men are taught one more crucial lesson: it’s OK to explode in violence and rage if their expectations of entitlement of power over everything and everyone else aren’t met. Fast enough, well enough, hard enough. All this we call “masculinity.”
How are men taught this thing called “masculinity”? The more apt question is: how aren’t they? It’s inculcated into them in movies, books, ads. In cultural scenario after scenario where being a “real” man is being rich, powerful, dominant, acquisitive, and materialistic. Christian Grey was so sexy — he was a billionaire who’d tie you up! Be tied up if you want to be tied up — but does having a billionaire abuse you really add to the thrill? Maybe you see my point. The superhero movies, the video games, education itself. All these things have become flashpoints in a “culture war” precisely because that is how little boys are taught to be “real men,” and being a real man means, above all, being entitled to dominion over bodies, and using violence if your expectations aren’t met.
Some of those bodies, historically, have been Black and brown — as in slavery, as in war. Some of them have been, and still are, “animals” — real men are killers, don’t you know. Some of those bodies have been those of the earth and the land and the oceans and the rivers. And of course many of those bodies have been “female.”
What proves the lie of masculinity? To a “real man,” men, too, can be female, conflated with feminine, and female men deserve as much abuse and harassment as women do. So the preferred insult among “real men” — in fraternities or sports clubs or so on, at least in America — is usually some kind of homophobic or misogynistic slur, to refer to the feminized body, which, to the “real man,” deserves abuse and scorn, because it is not masculine, meaning it doesn’t hold the entitlement of power over bodies, but rejects it, and is therefore a “b*tch,” or a “p*ssy,” or some other kind of misogynistic slur.
With me so far? That’s all abstract, but I really want you to understand the theory of masculinity, why it’s so hurtful — because you’re not going to to understand hyper-patriarchy unless you do.
So there’s a little boy, on the way to being a “man.” He hits puberty. He goes and begins to look for what we might call “sexual partners” — I think that’s a poor way to put it. The boy becoming a man is seeking intimacy and relationship and closeness and warmth. Yes, these things are expressed with our bodies — but the body is a means to those ends.
By now, though, maybe our little boy has internalised the values of masculinity. He’s already spent too much time on an internet, watching TV, playing video games, which teach him that “real men” dominate and abuse and harass. They take power. They aren’t interested in consent — and intimacy is something for “b*tches.” Being a real man is just about having power over bodies.
So he goes out and tries to do what he knows. He approaches girls by “negging” them. Insulting them, harassing them, demeaning them. He doesn’t understand the fine line between the charm of flirtation’s mild and humorous challenges — and outright scorn and contempt.
What do women do? They walk away, rolling their eyes. At least most of them do. After all, women, too are taught masculinity — that being “desired” is being abused and harassed and dominated. But to many of them, at least by now, it doesn’t feel right. The cultural value feels at odd with the emotional experience. It doesn’t feel much like love when a man is telling you how ugly and stupid you are — no matter how much our dumb culture tries to beat it into women. So women walk away from men like this, more and more.
The only men who can really win this game are predators. The ones who are the most violent and hateful of all. Maybe they end up with a few dates, or even girlfriends — of the kinds who have internalised masculinity too, internalised their own misogyny, and hate themselves as women, think that being loved and desired and wanted is being treated with contempt and scorn and rage.
So now our little boy is seeing something happening that he can’t quite understand, grasp, grapple with. Women — who are increasingly liberated — aren’t interested in his nonsense, these toxic values of masculinity he keeps trying to wield over them like cudgels. They aren’t interested in dating him because he’s a gigantic assh*le.
And yet he looks around, and he sees that there are assh*les that seem to win the “mating game”, the contest for “hot women” that patriarchy makes masculinity. He doesn’t understand that these assh*les aren’t having real relationships, that the poor women trapped in them are being emotionally if not physically abused, that they won’t provide him with the intimacy and warmth he’s really looking for. Because the assh*les are the loudest of all, shouting about how “hot” their “women” are, our little boy feels a sense of despair and rage.
He must not be a man.
What is he? Well, what does masculinity say is not a man? A woman. Our little boy begins to think of himself as feminized — the worst thing of all to be in a patriarchy, a second caste, a commodity, a “b*tch”, a [insert homophobic slur], and so on. If he’s not a real man, then he must be weak, and being weak is being feminized. Our little boy might not think all this consciously, but he is certainly thinking it unconsciously. How do we know? Because of what happens next.
Beginning to see himself as feminized — the one thing that’s not acceptable for a real man — our little boy feels a rising panic. He has to act. So what does he do? Of course, he goes on the internet. And there he’s taught to double down. On masculinity. He’s taught that the problem is that he’s not being enough of an assh*le. That to get women to desire him, he has to be even more scornful, contemptuous, abusive, toxic, hurtful.
He has to be even more of a real man.
He now has a resolution to his problem — he can’t “get girls,” which means he’s not enough of a “real man,” so the solution is to be even more of one. Which, in practice, amounts to doubling down on being a douchebag. Note, though, what’s actually going on: women who are increasingly liberated are walking away from him, because he is a violent, stupid moron. There’s nothing interesting or cool or funny or charming about him. There’s just this anger and rage which he’s been taught is the key to female desire. Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem to be working.
This bizarre, backwards process — men being taught they have to be assh*les to “get the girl,” it not working, because increasingly liberated women walk away, so men, drawing the wrong lesson entirely, taught do so by the internet, double down, and conclude they’re not douchebag enough yet — goes on and on throughout boyhood becoming manhood now. You can see it literally everywhere if you look.
How does the internet teach men to double down on toxic masculinity — instead of give it up? Well, that happens because boys who don’t have much experience with women, whose only experience of women is through p*rn and social media, get together on forums, which are now the stuff of legend, the most toxic places on the internet. And it’s the blind leading the blind. Together, they fall off a cliff of male violence. They draw the only conclusion that masculinity allows them to draw. “You’re not getting girls because you’re not enough of a massive douchebag yet! You’ve got to be even more of one!!”
And that is how men are being radicalised to hate women online. Because pretty soon, this process results in real hate. Spend enough time with other men who can’t get a date because they’re douchebags — but think the problem is that they’re not abusive and violent enough yet to really be “real men” — and soon enough a vicious cycle takes hold. Women are “sl*ts,” numbers on a scale of 1 to 10, and your only status and power and worth as a man comes from how many “10s” you’ve “scored.”
Yes, teenage boys have done that since time immemorial — but not in the way the internet imagines. Most teenagers have pretended to do all that. The number of teenage boys who’ve actually gone out there and had massive utopian sex with a supermodel is probably about the size of my shoes. But on the forums where boys reinforce other boys’ imaginary beliefs, they really believe and imagine that they’re entitled to “10s,” all the time, and if they don’t “get them,” they’re not worthy of masculinity, they’re feminized, they’re not real men.
See the point? Human relationships have been commodified — reduced to numbers. The whole goal of them — intimacy, warmth, closeness — has been denuded and lost. Women have been dehumanized — and so have the boys who believe this nonsense, because they spend their boyhoods and manhoods desperately believing they’re not “real men,” and that’s the problem, the reason they’re so alone, whereas the truth is that they’re just not very good or interesting or thoughtful people.
How far can this vicious cycle go? It can go all the way to the bitter end. Right down to making mass murderers of men who consider themselves “losers” because they’re not “bagging 10s” every night. That’s what “incels” in Torontoand New Zealand did, after all. And that’s what appears to have played a pretty serious part in provoking the Atlanta attacks too.
Boys are being radicalised to hate women. They are being taught that’s what being a real man is. Because if female desire isn’t coming your way, it must because you’re not violent, brutal, and abusive enough — since we know that’s what women have always really wanted since time immemorial.
So says masculinity.
That’s how a mass murderer is born.
All of that’s “sexual anguish,” I guess. But nobody should imagine that it justifies or legitimises mass murder. The point I’m trying to make is this.
Patriarchy is entering a new chapter thanks to the internet. Yes, masculinity has always taught men to subjugate women, and if they can’t they themselves are feminine, and aren’t real men. But on the internet, now, that is happening at light speed, with no checks or balances or safeguards or guardrails. Sad guys who have no experience with women repeat the myth to each other over and over again to the point that it metastasises in the brain and causes a kind of meltdown of rage, hate, and violence, to the point of mass murder.
Patriarchy in this way rules out the possibility of warm and loving and close relationships for men, too. It takes away the chance of intimacy. It reduces them to things who are seeking power over bodies, and justifying it with the myth that such bodies desire violence in the first place, because that is what being female really is: needing to be subjugated. Who wants to date someone like that? The answer, these days, is: less and less women, who walk away from these sad-dork-bros rolling their eyes.
But the biggest victims of patriarchy are, of course, still women. They have to wade through a sea of entitled dorks flaunting their douchebaggery just to find a date, and yes, that always been true, but has it been this true? They’re reduced to using apps created by men which reduce relationships to quantitative “hook-ups” just to try to have relationships. And they have to risk the threat of male violence, still, at every turn, which is justified and legitimated by legions of sad guys, who go on repeating the myth to one another that what women really want is the world’s biggest a-hole, not a real person with a mind and soul they can relate to.
You’re going to ask me how to fix this right about now. The truth is: I don’t know. But what I do know is that nobody should have to grow up like this. The internet is poisoning our societies in so many ways. It’s battering away at democracy, turning people’s minds to fascist mush. It’s stealing childhood, gluing kids to screens, instead of engaging them with art, books, living things, creativity. And hyper-masculinity — sad men who consider themselves losers banding together to repeat the myth that women really want violence and subjugation, and they’re not “getting girls” because they’re not predatory and abusive enough — seems to be even worse than the toxic masculinity which preceded it. These are the cultural problems of our age — and they’re big ones.
Fix them? First we have to begin understanding that they really exist. But what else does so much male violence against women, so constantly, really tell us?
Umair
March 2021